A Canadian content creator, Anthony Sistilli, built a homemade Flock-style automatic license plate reader to demonstrate how the same surveillance tools used to track civilians could be turned on police. Using an inexpensive Amazon camera, a laptop and quick machine-learning code, his system scanned video for vehicles that looked like police cars, attempted plate reads only when confident, and logged GPS, images, time and plate data to a database. He posted short videos of the prototype on Sept. 4 and Sept. 9, which went viral (about 1.6 million YouTube views and 523,000 Instagram views), and while the rig was rudimentary - often blocked, low-mounted and missing many plates - it proved the basic feasibility of a DIY approach.
The project prompted a 30-minute visit from Peel Regional Police on Sept. 20, who said mapping officers’ movements could endanger them or aid criminals; Sistilli countered that he had collected little data and sought transparency through retention limits and audit logs. His experiment sits amid broader controversy over commercial plate-reader networks like Flock - roughly 120,000 devices across the U.S. - after revelations of cross-jurisdiction searches by ICE, officer misconduct using the data, false positives leading to wrongful arrests, and dozens of cities rejecting contracts. Public reaction ranged from calls for shared police-tracking maps to threats, underscoring a narrow middle ground between policing needs and civil-liberty concerns.
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